After reading this article about the incompetence of the Brisbane city council in respect of issuing building permits to build in a known flood zone. I was struck by the irony of the recent actions of shire councils around Australia, refusing building permits on the basis of speculative sea level rise estimates produced by global warming alarmists.
I subsequently found the following post by Jamez on Jo Nova's blog that sums up the situation succinctly.
All the shire councils know what the water levels were in 1974 and other floods before them. It was therefore a fair and reasonable call that at some time in the future those water levels would be reached again. So a responsible government has two choices, don’t let people build in areas which are clearly flood prone, or take flood mitigation measures to ensure those water levels can’t be reached again. Or a combination of both.
For a dam to provide flood mitigation it needs to carry at most 50% of maximum capacity to enable it to take up large flows when they happen. So lots of dams are needed for serious flood mitigation. They built the Wivenhoe Dam, but not much else. In fact one expert was suggesting a number of dams had been decommissioned in Queensland. It also appears as Jo has pointed out, that Wivenhoe may have been lacking proper flood mitigation procedures.
The irony is that Shire Councils around Australia have been refusing building and development applications on the basis of the IPCC/CSIRO sea level rise estimates, saying it would be foolhardy to allow building in areas which could be under threat from rising sea levels. We are also being told we need a carbon tax and we need to take all sorts of climate change mitigation action.
So as a society we take more action on hotly debated speculation about possible sea level rises, than we do on the known likelihood of flooding in certain areas. Dumb huh?
Dumb indeed! Is there no end to the stupid follies imposed on us by PC "Seeming" Utopian Bureaucrats.
